Wargaming the Far Future Working Group
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Wargaming the Far Future Working Group Connections US Wargaming Conference 2019 US Army War College Carlisle PA Final Report, 5th November 2019 Working Group Chair Stephen Downes-Martin Contributors Stephen Aguilar-Milan, Sebastian J. Bae, Deon Canyon, Jonathan Cham, Thomas Choinski, Stephen Downes-Martin, John Hanley, William Lademan, Graham Longley-Brown, Brian McCue, Ed McGrady, Robert Mosher, Jeremy Smith, Kristan Wheaton The content of this document represents the opinion solely of the contributors and does not represent the policy of any organization. Working Group members maintain full and exclusive intellectual property rights over their contributions. They have granted permission for their contributions to be included in this report. Any errors, misrepresentation or misinterpretation in this document are the sole responsibility of Stephen Downes-Martin. Wargaming the Far Future Table of Contents Executive Summary 3 Working Group Research Papers 5 Working Group Discussions 217 Workshop Discussions 243 Integrated Bibliography 261 2 Wargaming the Far Future Executive Summary Situation Our most potent power projection and warfighting capabilities, developed in response to current and near future threats, are technologically advanced, hugely expensive, and have half- century service lives. The first of these characteristics gives us a temporary and possibly short lived warfighting edge. The second grants our political leaders short lived economic and political advantages. The last characteristic locks us into high expenses in maintenance and upgrades for many years in order to justify the initial sunk costs as though they were investments. This combination forces us onto a high-inertia security trajectory that is transparent to our more agile adversaries, providing them with credible information about that trajectory while giving them time to adapt with cheaper counter forces, technologies and strategies. We must therefore wargame out to service life, the “far future”, to ensure our current and future weapons systems and concepts of operations are well designed for both the near term and the far future. However a 50 year forecasting horizon is beyond the credibility limit for wargaming. The Working Group and the Workshop explored and documented ways that wargaming can deal with this horizon. Challenges Working Group and Workshop participants selected the following broad challenges to wargaming the far future for examination – details are documented in this report: Institutional ➢ Our national security institutions are short term focused. ➢ A peacetime military becomes inflexible in the face of massive surprise. ➢ Concern with the near term reduces motive to be rigorous when gaming the far future. Process ➢ Wargaming in the far future is reactive. ➢ Command and control of advanced technology enabled forces is unclear. Uncertainty ➢ Indeterminism and uncertainty grow as one looks out into the far future. ➢ There is a combinatorial explosion of possible interactions and futures. ➢ Credibility, Plausibility and Probability of far future scenarios are hard to determine. ➢ Discontinuous and black swan advances in technology will occur. ➢ Complexity of interacting causal factors grows as we look into the future. 3 Wargaming the Far Future Approaches The following approaches covering these challenges were explored and are documented in this report along with their advantages, disadvantages and barriers to implementation. Since most of the approaches covered more than one challenge, there is not a one-to-one mapping between challenges and approaches. Organizational ➢ Build an organization explicitly tasked and designed to wargame the far future. ➢ Reinvigorate best practices for wargaming and identify new ones required for gaming the far future. Social Engineering ➢ Explore how wargaming influences military thought, not just how military thought influences wargaming. ➢ Use wargaming to increase people’s ability to handle the unknown far future. ➢ Take into account the psychology of how people think and worry about the future. Futurism ➢ Embed futuring framework and foresight planning into the wargame process. ➢ Use systems thinking to design future scenarios. ➢ Base future scenarios on possible Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs) driven by changes in energy sources. Process ➢ Wargame DoD acquisition to develop capabilities in months and years. ➢ Wargame trajectory from now to the far future using month/year acquisition wargames as inputs. ➢ Wargame our stable societal values versus our adversary societal values. ➢ Run wargames multiple times with a different game design each time. ➢ Run wargames multiple times for each game design. ➢ Wargame sensitivity analysis over many games to explore when assumed technology or capability levels become useful to the warfighting decision makers. ➢ Combine scenario planning and operational design into path gaming. This Document This document contains the papers written by the working group, their discussions while they wrote and refined those papers from November 2018 to June 2019, and the discussions at the workshop held during the Connections US Wargaming Conference in August 2019. 4 Wargaming the Far Future Working Group Research Papers Using Futuring to Generate Better Wargaming Scenarios 7 Stephen Aguilar-Milan Common Pathologies and Pitfalls of Wargaming Future Technologies 19 Sebastian J. Bae Geopolitical Matrix Gaming in 15 and 50 Year Future Scenarios 29 Deon Canyon, Jonathan Cham Wargaming the Future: Developing Scenarios and Galvanizing Support 59 Thomas Choinski Break the Forecasting Horizon by Values Gaming 69 Stephen Downes-Martin Coming to Grips with Indeterminacy in the Practice of “Futures” Gaming 79 for Strategy Formulation John Hanley Brand New World 113 William Lademan Wargaming the Future Requires Rigorous Adherence to Best Practices 121 Graham Longley-Brown, Jeremy Smith Wargaming the Uncertain Future 133 Brian McCue From World War 3 to Starsoldier: Gaming design and gaming the future 167 Ed McGrady War and Wargames Beyond the Event Horizon 199 Robert Mosher How To Think About The Future 207 Kristan Wheaton 5 Wargaming the Far Future 6 Wargaming the Far Future Using Futuring to Generate Better Wargaming Scenarios © Stephen Aguilar-Millan Research Director, European Futures Observatory Executive Summary Wargaming can be seen as an act of anticipating future events to expose weaknesses in current thinking and to help develop strategies to overcome those weaknesses. Within this conceptual framework, the process of thinking about the future in a more systematic way can be used to help design better wargames. From the perspective of the present, the future can be a vast space to populate. There is an extremely large, almost endless, number of possible futures that could emerge. In order to bring structure to this very large number of possibilities, futurists have developed a number of techniques to help view the future in a systematic way. If a wargame acts as a generative vehicle for multiple futures, then playing the wargame multiple times will test the underlying assumptions of the game and provide us with a heat map of results. The heat map would help us to assess the robustness of the results. This process starts by putting the future into the wargame design. We need to start with the purpose that the wargame is to serve before we begin to think about inserting a futures approach to the design of a wargame. We need to be clear about the scale and scope of the wargame. Whether or not such a game produces results that are convincing is neither here nor there. An unconvincing game can tell us as much about the future as a convincing game if we conduct a rigorous review of why the game is unconvincing. In many ways, that is where the injection of futures into wargame design can be useful. It forces us to identify our conscious and unconscious assumptions, and to subject them to a rigorous challenge. In determining these issues, the wargame designer would have to confront the assumptions, which are often tacit, that are being brought into the game structure. It is by confronting these assumptions that we reduce the possibility of being blindsided by an emerging future that we hadn’t previously considered. In that sense, we would become better equipped to deal with an emerging future. And that is how futuring can be used to generate better wargame scenarios. Introduction At the professional level, wargaming is an act of anticipating future events to expose weaknesses in current thinking and to help develop strategies to overcome those weaknesses. Within this conceptual framework, the process of thinking about the future in a more 7 Wargaming the Far Future systematic way can be used to help design better wargames. We can think of this advantage from two perspectives – wargames that better expose the key issues facing future conflict and wargames that give better insight into how future events will unfold. Wargames that better expose the key issues of the future are by their nature quite speculative. In their construction, much will depend upon the assumptions made by the game designers in terms of the key actors and the key relationships within the game. These assumptions are given form within the rules of the game. A more speculative approach would lead us to question the rules themselves in terms of their reasonableness in reflecting possible future events. An unfettered approach to the questioning of assumptions would provide some doubt over the validity of the game.